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Santa Blogs I

Posted on December 14, 2009

Dear Santa Blogs:

I keep asking for vampire books for Christmas, and Santa Claus keeps bringing me books with fuzzy bunnies and like that. Is he working through you, and, if so, could you try to get it right this year, you big pumpkin muffin? It’s enough to make a kid stop believing. I am eight years old now and it is time to move on from bunnies.

Virginia

Dear Virginia:

Do you call Santa names in your letters to him? I think we may have the answer to your problem right there.

Anyway, Virginia, I hope you are not going to lose faith in old Santa because the holiday doesn’t turn out the way you like. He is really enlisting you in one of the oldest and greatest of all Christmas traditions: complaining.

People traditionally complain about their presents (like you, plum dumpling), about their food (think of all the fruitcake jokes alone), about the expense, about the weather, about the lack of time, and about the complete lack of attention paid to the religious nature of the holiday. (This complaint goes back at least as far as the Roman winter festival of Saturnalia. We find writers in the first century B.C. complaining about the secularization of the day. Go look it up in one of your bunny books, carrot cake.) If you don’t complain about SOMETHING at Christmas, you’re missing one of the ancient joys of the season.

I am afraid I cannot speak for Santa Claus in this matter, but I will suggest a compromise. Surely, at the ripe old age of eight, you are beginning to receive cash gifts. Bank these, oh raspberry cheesecake, until July, when you can come and buy all the vampire books you can carry at the second annual 25th Newberry Library Book Fair. Tell ‘em Santa Blogs sent you.

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